Tag Archives: Conservation

Tight But Loose – just what is “biodiversity”?

Fleet photo 1

Ever since I set up the Biodiversity Blog in 2012 I’ve had it in mind to write a post asking the question “Just what is “biodiversity”?”, but have never quite got round to it, there’s been too many other interesting and important things to write about on here! This week over at the Dynamic Ecology blog Brian McGill has beaten me to it with a really interesting post entitled: Biodiversity and pizza – an extended analogy leading to a call for a more multidimensional treatment of nature.

I’m not entirely sure that the pizza analogy works, it’s a little tortuous, but none the less the post is provocative and interesting, and has generated a lot of comments. I strongly recommend it.

In the interests of recycling, and because the readership of my blog only overlaps partially with that of Dynamic Ecology, thought I’d restate a few things that I brought up in the comments to Brian’s post (but this certainly won’t substitute for going over and reading it yourself”.

One of the questions that Brian asks is: “Is biodiversity a useful term or has it outlived its usefulness?” It’ll come as no surprise to readers that I like the word “biodiversity”: I used it for the title of my blog and for my professorship, because it captures a lot about what I value in the natural world, and because it’s a term that I’ve (professionally speaking) grown up with. To my mind it is an umbrella term that can mean different things to different people; some see this as a disadvantage but I think that, as long as we qualify precisely what we are referring to, using “biodiversity” in a loose way is not a problem. Perhaps an appropriate analogy is with politics: if someone describes themselves as a “conservative” or a “socialist” or a “liberal”, those terms cover huge internal variation and political scope, but it’s not a problem because it broadly describes the beliefs of that individual.

As an instance of when “biodiversity” may not be a useful concept for nature conservation, Brian gives an example of salt marsh, often areas with rather low species diversity, as being of low priority for conservation because they are poor in “biodiversity”. But this ignores the fact that all of the “official” definitions of biodiversity explicitly include diversity of habitats/communities/ecosystems/biomes in a defined geographical area. For example the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity defines it as:

“the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems.” [my emphasis]

Thus destroying an area of salt marsh may indeed result in few species being lost, but it would be a significant loss of biodiversity at that higher level of community/ecosystem, if a region has only salt marsh, woodland and grassland in it: in essence you’ve lost one third of your biodiversity because you’ve lost one third of your habitats.

Something that’s occurred to me over the last couple of days of reading comments and thinking about the questions that Brian posed is that “nature” and “biodiversity” are not actually synonymous at all. When people say they like “being in nature” or they “value contact with nature”, what they are usually saying is that they enjoy landscapes, seascapes, changes in the weather, being out of doors, etc., things which are not strictly part of what we understand as “biodiversity”.

Likewise, “protecting the environment” includes a whole set of non-biodiversity related questions and actions such as air and water quality, wastes management, sustainable use of resources, etc., much of which may not directly affect biodiversity at all.

“Biodiversity” has a specific meaning, as the definition above shows, even though that meaning can be broadly defined. Which sounds like a contradiction, but it’s not – and brought to mind the title of the Led Zeppelin fanzine: “Tight But Loose”*. Biodiversity as a concept and as a field of research and action involves so many different types of stakeholder (ecologist, botanist, zoologist, artist, conservationist, activist) that (as I said) it provides a useful (loose) umbrella. Problems only occur when people use different tight definitions and talk past one another.

The other aspect to Brian’s post is around the pros and cons of valuing ecosystem services, which is a much bigger argument in some ways, and I’m going to point readers to two blog posts, one recently from Steve Heard which I think is a very nice, concrete example that captures a lot of the uncertainties that Brian describes:

https://scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/invasions-beauty-and-ecosystem-services-a-conundrum/

The second is one of mine from last July related to the value of valuing nature, which was prompted by the Costanza et al. update paper:

https://jeffollerton.wordpress.com/2014/07/27/how-do-we-value-nature/

These are fascinating discussions that will run and run, I have no doubt.

*I’m fond of bringing musical examples into these blog posts 🙂

Nature Improvement Area final report published today by Defra

3 Replies

As regular readers of the blog will be aware, over the past three years my research group has been involved as a lead partner in the Nene Valley Nature Improvement Area (NIA) project, one of 12 NIA schemes across England. I’ve posted regular updates on the the Nene Valley NIA, for example see my posts entitled Angry Birds! (and startled bees), To Dream a River, and Biodiversity conservation pays its way.

Although our group still has work to do on writing up the results for our ecosystem services assessment of the Nene Valley, the NIA scheme has formally ended, and today Defra has issued a final NIA Monitoring and Evaluation Report, plus an accompanying press release. Defra (and the government) judges the NIA scheme to be a resounding success and I have to agree with them. To quote from the press release and from the final report:

Nearly 20,000 hectares of natural habitat – the equivalent of almost 23,000 football pitches – has been created, restored or preserved across England.
The Nature Improvement Areas have also helped people reconnect with nature, with volunteers contributing over 47,000 days, school children earning their green fingers by planting trees, and communities getting involved in decision making.
The NIA partnerships mobilised resources with an equivalent value of £26.2 million (including the financial value of volunteer time and services in-kind) in addition to the initial government grant funding. Of this total, £15.3 million was from non-public sources (e.g. private sector and nongovernmental organisations).
Learnings from the Nature Improvement Areas will now help to inform Defra’s 25 year plan for action on the environment which will be published later in the year as part of a comprehensive, long-term vision to protect the country’s natural heritage.

This last point is a critical one; much was achieved with the government’s initial investment of £7.5 million over three years. Continuation of this type of funding, for the original 12 NIAs and additional projects, would achieve so much more, especially if it was tied in with upland and river restoration projects that focused on natural flood defences (which we know will work). The potential savings from such investment could run into 100s of millions of pounds. Let’s hope Defra has the strategic vision to make this happen.

Protecting an ecosystem service: approaches to understanding and mitigating threats to wild insect pollinators

22 Replies

Bee on apple blossom 2 - 1st May 2015 Back in April 2015 I attended a two day meeting at Imperial College’s Silwood Park campus to discuss initial project ideas to address evidence gaps in the recent National Pollinator Strategy. I mentioned the meeting in passing in a post at the time concerned with whether biodiversity scientists should also be campaigners, but didn’t say a lot about what conclusions we came to and what the next steps would be because at the time I was unclear on both of those counts: it was a very wide ranging meeting with a lot of participants coming at the question of pollinator conservation from different perspectives. As well as academics there were representatives from the agrochemical industry, government research organisations, and the National Farmers Union.

During summer 2015 one of the conveners of the meeting, Dr Richard Gill, ~~herded cats~~ organised colleagues, pulled together all of the text and ideas that were generated, and took on the task of seeing a summary of the meeting through from initial draft to publication. It was a monumental effort, involving 27 authors and 86 manuscript pages, and Richard did a sterling job. Entitled “Protecting an ecosystem service: approaches to understanding and mitigating threats to wild insect pollinators” it will appear as a chapter in the next volume of Advances in Ecological Research, which should be published later this month.

The abstract and contents for the chapter are below; if anyone wants a copy of the full chapter, please let me know.

Abstract

Insect pollination constitutes an ecosystem service of global importance, providing significant economic and aesthetic benefits as well as cultural value to human society, alongside vital ecological processes in terrestrial ecosystems. It is therefore important to understand how insect pollinator populations and communities respond to rapidly changing environments if we are to maintain healthy and effective pollinator services. This paper considers the importance of conserving pollinator diversity to maintain a suite of functional traits to provide a diverse set of pollinator services. We explore how we can better understand and mitigate the factors that threaten insect pollinator richness, placing our discussion within the context of populations in predominantly agricultural landscapes in addition to urban environments. We highlight a selection of important evidence gaps, with a number of complementary research steps that can be taken to better understand: i) the stability of pollinator communities in different landscapes in order to provide diverse pollinator services; ii) how we can study the drivers of population change to mitigate the effects and support stable sources of pollinator services; and, iii) how we can manage habitats in complex landscapes to support insect pollinators and provide sustainable pollinator services for the
future. We advocate a collaborative effort to gain higher quality abundance data to understand the stability of pollinator populations and predict future trends. In addition, for effective mitigation strategies to be adopted, researchers need to conduct rigorous field- testing of outcomes under different landscape settings, acknowledge the needs of end-users when developing research proposals and consider effective methods of knowledge transfer to ensure effective uptake of actions.

Contents
1. Importance of Insect Pollination
1.1 Providing an Ecosystem Service
1.2 Brief Introduction to Pollination Ecology and the Importance of Wild
Pollinators
2. Major Threats to the Pollination Service Provided by Insects
3. Steps in the Right Direction to Protect Insect Pollinator Services: Policy Actions
4. Understanding and Mitigating Specific Threats to Wild Insect Pollinators to Protect Pollinator Services
4.1 Understanding the Stability of Insect Pollinator Communities
4.2 Using Molecular Approaches to Monitor Insect Pollinators
4.3 How Do Parasites Shape Wild Insect Pollinator Populations?
4.4 Understanding Insect Pollinator Population Responses to Resource Availability
4.5 Engineering Flowering Field Margins as Habitats to Attract Insect Pollinators
4.6 How Might We Improve the Wider Countryside to Support Insect Pollinators
4.7 Insect Pollinators in Urban Areas
5. Considerations When Developing Future Research and Mitigation Strategies
Acknowledgements
Appendix
References

Biodiversity lost and found: extinct island birds and living African dragonflies

4 Replies

Two newly published studies have caught my eye this week as exemplifying two important aspects of biodiversity research: describing new species and understanding which species we’ve recently lost due to human activities.

Researchers working in the Macaronesian islands of the Azores and Madeira have described five new species of endemic water rails (genus Rallus) that are thought to have gone extinct within the period when humans colonised the islands. One species may even have hung on into historic times. All of the species were either flightless or had reduced capacity for flying, making them vulnerable to over-exploitation by humans. That’s a common phenomenon on oceanic islands, with the dodo being the archetypical example.

What’s particularly remarkable is that these five new species increases the known recent diversity of the genus Rallus by about one third! The reference for the paper, and a link to the pdf, is:

Alcover et al. (2015) Five new extinct species of rails (Aves: Gruiformes: Rallidae) from the Macaronesian Islands (North Atlantic Ocean) Zootaxa 4057: 151–190

The second paper is a mass-naming of 60 (!) new African dragonfly and damselfly species by a team led by KD Dijkstra, a Dutch entomologist whose work I’ve mentioned previously. I had the pleasure of teaching with KD on a Tropical Biology Association field course in Tanzania a few years ago and his knowledge of African natural history is astounding.

To put these 60 new species into context, it increases the known diversity of African dragonflies and damselflies by almost 10%. The reference and a link to the paper follows:

Dijkstra et al. (2015) Sixty new dragonfly and damselfly species from Africa (Odonata). Odonatologica 44: 447-678

Finding appropriate names for all of these insect species has required a degree of ingenuity from the authors and a quote from the paper demonstrates how memorable and creative some of them are:

“The Peace Sprite Pseudagrion pacale was discovered on the Moa River near Sierra Leone’s diamond capital Kenema. Twenty years earlier villagers trapped between rebel and government forces on opposite banks drowned in these tranquil waters. Two years later Kenema became the national epicentre of the Ebola outbreak…… The horntail Tragogomphus grogonfla evokes a Liberian pronunciation of ‘dragonfly’, the sparklewing Umma gumma a classic Pink Floyd album…… and the claspertail Onychogomphus undecim simply its date of discovery, 11/11/11.”

One of the things that I’ve tried to impress upon my final year undergraduate students this term during our Monday morning biodiversity seminars is just how little we still don’t understand about life on our planet. Discoveries of new species are a regular occurrence, and for most we know nothing about their life histories or their interactions with other species (the aspect of biodiversity that particularly interests me). In other cases (as with the Macaronesian water rails) the species were gone before we knew that they even existed. I wish that I could be sure that this won’t happen in the future, but it will, until we (and the future generations that we are teaching) do something to address the problems of habitat destruction and inappropriate exploitation of biodiversity.

8 things I learned from the Parliamentary Pollinators Update seminar – UPDATED

7 Replies

POST event December 2015

As I advertised a couple of weeks ago, last Wednesday I was in London to take part in a Pollinators Update seminar at the Houses of Parliament organised by the Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology (POST). It was a very interesting event and good to catch up with some of the latest ideas about pollinators and their conservation. However it’s been a busy week since then and I’ve not had time to post a full account of the seminar, which was attended by over 40 people. So I’ve decided to write a brief summary of eight things I learned that day from my fellow speakers* and from the day in general; in some cases I’ve linked to the original sources where available:

1. About 46% of Europe’s bumblebees have declining populations (see the European Red List for Bees that I highlighted in an earlier post)

2. Around 2% of the world’s bee species do 80% of the crop pollination (Kleijn et al. (2015) Nature Communications)

3. Pollinators other than bees perform 39% of the flower visits to crops (Rader et al. (2015) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

4. By 2100 the Red-tailed Bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius), one of the commonest species in Europe, may be extinct across most of the continent due to climate change (Rasmont et al. (2015) Climatic Risk and Distribution Atlas of European Bumblebees)

5. Only 6.6% of Entry Level Stewardship agreements by farmers across England included plans to grow nectar- and pollen-rich flower mixes.

6. Criticism of laboratory studies of the effects of neonicotinoid pesticides are just as illogical as criticisms of field studies: both have their limitations and advantages, and both are needed.

7. A panel of four experts on pollinators and pollination will largely agree about the answers to most questions an audience asks.

8. A Westminster seminar such as this will attract very few MPs if it clashes with an important debate in the House of Commons, in this case about future military action in Syria.

UPDATE: here’s a number 9 suggested by Simon Potts: we all strongly support and encourage the setup of an All Party Parliamentary Group on “Pollinators” not just “honeybees” or “bees”.

*With thanks to my fellow panelists Simon Potts, Claire Carvell and Richard Gill, and to Kirsten Miller and the POST team for organising the event, and for the photograph of the panel in action.

Virtual Conference on Ecology and Climate Change

1 Reply

Following on from what seemed to be a quite popular Virtual Conference on Pollinators, Pollination and Flowers I thought I’d mark this week’s Paris talks on tackling climate change with a second “virtual conference” on the topic of climate change and how it may affect (and be affected by) natural and agricultural ecological systems.

This is a great set of talks* with some very thought-provoking ideas. Hope you enjoy them.

Douglas Sheil (Norwegian University of Life Sciences)

Do forests attract rain?

Hans Joosten (University of Griefswald)

For peat’s sake – bogs and climate change

Nicola Di Cosmo (Institute for Advanced Study)

Climate, conflict, and historical method

Ben Beard (NCEZID Centers for Disease Control)

Climate change, ecology, and disease emergence

Jennifer Cartwright and Bill Wolfe (USGS Tennessee Water Science Center)

Climate-sensitive, insular ecosystems of the Southeast U.S.

Nabil Nemer (American University of Beirut)

Are changes in insect patterns in the Lebanese Mountains evidence of climate change?

Lini Wollenberg (University of Vermont)

Climate Change Mitigation on Agriculture-Forest Landscapes

Tim Benton (University of Leeds)

Food and the future: climate and resilience

Feel free to discuss the talks in the comments section and to post links to other talks on the same topic.

*I’m assuming that, as all of these videos are in the public domain, none of the presenters or copyright owners objects to them being presented here. If you do, please get in touch and I’ll remove it.

Butterflies and pesticides – a new study and a smoking gun

2 Replies

Gatekeeper cropped P1010472

Following hot on the trail of the raft of recent papers that I highlighted on the blog last week comes a new study by Andre Gilburn and colleagues entitled “Are neonicotinoid pesticides driving declines of widespread butterflies?“. The paper is open access and published in the journal PeerJ which encourages post-publication comments and review of the work. I see that Tom Oliver of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology has started the ball rolling with a couple of questions, and hopefully more will follow, with responses from the authors.

The paper focuses on the fact that between 2000 and 2009 there was a 58% decline in butterfly abundance on farmed land in the UK despite a doubling of spending on conservation in the UK over the same period, much of it on agri-environmental schemes on that very same farmed land.

Using a statistical modelling approach the authors conclude that the introduction of neonicotinoid pesticides in the mid-1990s is strongly implicated as a likely driver of those declines. My immediate question on reading the paper was: “What were the trends like before the mid-1990s, and did the rate of decline change significantly after that period?”

The authors don’t directly answer the question but it seems to me to be quite an important one to answer because abrupt changes in rates of decline in the abundance and diversity of species can be linked to broader changes in, for example, land management and agricultural practices, as we showed recently for bee and wasp extinctions in Britain.

So I looked for the data that would tell me whether the trend had changed and found what I needed in the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme annual report for 2014. Here’s a screen grab of Figure 3 from the report:

Butterfly abundance indices - November 2015

I’ve marked the point at which neonicotinoid pesticides were starting to be widely used in UK farming with a black line. As you can clearly see this is also roughly the point at which the abundance of the 24 “Species of the wider countryside” begins to trend downwards. In comparison, the 26 “Habitat specialists” show much less of a change, and in fact their initial decline was much earlier (in the 1970s-80s), possibly in response to loss of species rich grassland and ancient woodland.

Of course I’m just eyeballing the data and it needs to be tested statistically to see if there really is a break point in the trend at the mid-1990s, but this ought to be possible for anyone with access to the full data set. Even if this is shown to be the case it’s all correlative (as Gilburn and colleagues acknowledge) and proving causation is difficult. Nonetheless it looks to me like there’s an interesting smoking gun here that deserves further study.

Pollinators seminar at the Houses of Parliament – 2nd December

5 Replies

Skipper on ragwort - cropped

The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) has organised a “Pollinators Update” afternoon seminar in London on Wednesday 2nd December, to discuss recent developments in pollinator conservation research. I’ve been asked to give a 15 minute presentation on the pollinator extinctions research we published in Science last year.

The full programme will be:

2.30pm Sarah Newton MP, Chair’s Welcome
2.40pm Presentations
Professor Simon Potts (Professor of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) – Reading University
Professor Jeff Ollerton (Professor of Biodiversity) University of Northampton
Dr Claire Carvell – NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology
Dr Richard Gill – Imperial College London
3.40pm Discussion
3.55pm Chair’s closing remarks
4.00pm Refreshments

The seminar is free to attend but you need to book a place: see the POST website for details.

A plant-pollinator walk-and-talk, Bradlaugh Fields, 14th June

2 Replies

Yesterday afternoon I spent an enjoyable couple of hours leading a group of over 30 people around the nature reserves of Bradlaugh Fields in the centre of Northampton. The participants were a combination of members of the Northants Natural History Society and local residents who regularly use the park.

We discussed the ecology of the area, focussing on the plants and how they are pollinated. It was great to see such a range of ages on the walk, and a pleasure to tell them some interesting stories and answer their questions. Over at the Bradlaugh Fields Visitor blog, Serena (who took the picture above and who organised the event) has a fuller account of the day.

Urban bee diversity – a new study

39 Replies

Over the past couple of years I’ve mentioned urban pollinators, and specifically the work of my PhD student Muzafar Hussain Sirohi, several times; for example here and here. Muzafar is currently finishing off the writing of his thesis, and during that time he’s also managed to publish the first paper from the study.

We are really pleased with this paper because not only is it the product of a lot of hard work to systematically sample and identify the bees, but the results are really exciting: Muzafar has shown that the centre of Northampton is home to a more diverse set of bee species than expected. In fact at least 50 species of bees are thought to live within a 500m radius of All Saints Church, which is significantly more than are found in the nature reserves at the edge of the town.

Muzafar’s work involved surveying the small gardens, road verges, traffic islands, and other patches of plants in the urban centre of Northampton. These areas provide important nectar and pollen sources for the bees, whilst old stone walls and bare soil offer opportunities for nesting sites. This community of bees includes one nationally rare Red Data Book species called Coelioxys quadridentata that is known from rather few sites.

Our estimate of about 50 species of bees is certainly too low because we focussed on the more neglected groups of bees and didn’t include the social bumblebees. The true figure is likely to be over 60 species, a remarkable number given the small area surveyed.

As I’ve discussed many times on this blog, pollinators such as bees are hugely important both ecologically (most plants require them for reproduction) and economically (much of our food production relies directly or indirectly on pollination by animals). However a significant proportion of bee species in the UK are declining in abundance, and some have gone extinct. Understanding how these bees are distributed across the landscape, including urban areas, is crucial to the conservation of such pollinators in a rapidly changing world. The project therefore has implications not only for conservation of biodiversity, but also food security, given the number of urban gardeners who grow their own food, and the ability of many bees to travel significant distance from urban to rural areas.

The research is published in the international, peer-reviewed Journal of Insect Conservation. The full reference (with a link to the abstract) is:

Sirohi, M.H., Jackson, J., Edwards, M. & Ollerton, J. (2015) Diversity and abundance of solitary and primitively eusocial bees in an urban centre: a case study from Northampton (England). Journal of Insect Conservation DOI 10.1007/s10841-015-9769-2

If anyone would like to receive a PDF of the paper, please leave a comment below or drop me an email: jeff.ollerton[at]northampton.ac.uk